Critical Culture: Environmental Adult Education in Public Museums

Lorraine Bell; Darlene E. Clover

doi:10.1002/ace.20218

Animating ‘The Blank Page’: Exhibitions as Feminist Community Adult Education

Social Sciences ◽

10.3390/socsci7100204 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 7 (10) ◽

pp. 204

Author(s):

Darlene Clover

Keyword(s):

Adult Education ◽

Indigenous Women ◽

Women's Bodies ◽

Art Galleries ◽

Gender Consciousness ◽

Women's Power ◽

Feminist Community ◽

Public Museums ◽

The 19Th Century ◽

Community Adult

Public museums and art galleries in Canada are highly authoritative, and trusted knowledge and identity mobilising institutions, whose exhibitions are frequently a ‘blank page’ of erasure, silencing, and marginalisation, in terms of women’s histories, experiences, and contributions. Feminist exhibitions are a response to this, but few in Canada have been explored as practices of feminist community adult education. I begin to address this gap with an analysis of two feminist exhibitions: In Defiance: Indigenous Women Define Themselves, curated by Mohawk-Iroquois artist, Lindsay Katsitsakatste Delaronde, at the Legacy Gallery, University of Victoria; and Fashion Victims: The Pleasures & Perils of Dress in the 19th Century, curated by Ryerson Professor Alison Matthews David, at the Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto. Although dissimilar in form, focus, and era, these exhibitions act as powerful intentional pedagogical processes of disruption and reclamation, using images and storytelling to animate, re-write and reimagine the ‘blank pages’ of particular and particularised histories and identities. Through the centrality of women’s bodies and practices of violence, victimization, and women’s power, these exhibitions encourage the feminist oppositional imagination, dialogic looking, gender consciousness, and a visual literacy of hope and possibility. Yet, as women’s stories become audible through the very representational vehicles and institutional spaces used to silence them, challenges remain.

Download Full-text

Understanding functional illiteracy from a policy, adult education, and cognition point of view: Towards a joint referent framework

Zeitschrift für Neuropsychologie ◽

10.1024/1016-264x/a000255 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 30 (2) ◽

pp. 109-122

Author(s):

Aleksandar Bulajić ◽

Miomir Despotović ◽

Thomas Lachmann

Keyword(s):

Adult Education ◽

Operational Definition ◽

Literacy Skills ◽

Point Of View ◽

Industrialized Countries ◽

Functional Illiteracy ◽

Scale Levels ◽

Components Of Reading ◽

The One ◽

Definition Of

Abstract. The article discusses the emergence of a functional literacy construct and the rediscovery of illiteracy in industrialized countries during the second half of the 20th century. It offers a short explanation of how the construct evolved over time. In addition, it explores how functional (il)literacy is conceived differently by research discourses of cognitive and neural studies, on the one hand, and by prescriptive and normative international policy documents and adult education, on the other hand. Furthermore, it analyses how literacy skills surveys such as the Level One Study (leo.) or the PIAAC may help to bridge the gap between cognitive and more practical and educational approaches to literacy, the goal being to place the functional illiteracy (FI) construct within its existing scale levels. It also sheds more light on the way in which FI can be perceived in terms of different cognitive processes and underlying components of reading. By building on the previous work of other authors and previous definitions, the article brings together different views of FI and offers a perspective for a needed operational definition of the concept, which would be an appropriate reference point for future educational, political, and scientific utilization.

Download Full-text